An iterative method for obtaining a nonlinear solution for the temperature distribution of a spinning spherical body irradiated by a central star

Abstract

We developed an iterative method for determining the three-dimensional temperature distribution in a spherical spinning body that is irradiated by a central star. The seasonal temperature change due to the orbital motion is ignored. It is assumed that material parameters such as the thermal conductivity and the thermometric conductivity are constant throughout the spherical body. A general solution for the temperature distribution inside a body is obtained using spherical harmonics and spherical Bessel functions. The surface boundary condition contains a term obtained using the Stefan–Boltzmann law and is nonlinear with respect to temperature because it is dependent on the fourth power of temperature. The coefficients of the general solution are fitted to satisfy the surface boundary condition by using the iterative method. We obtained solutions that satisfy the nonlinear boundary condition within 0.1% accuracy. We calculated the rate of change in the semimajor axis due to the diurnal Yarkovsky effect using the linear and nonlinear solutions. The maximum difference between the rates calculated using the two sets of solutions is 13%. Therefore current understanding of the diurnal Yarkovsky effect based on linear solutions is fairly good.